El Shaddai: Ascension of the MetatronReview

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A missed opportunity for something new.

By Colin Moriarty

For better or for worse, it's always nice to see a developer try something truly different. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is one such attempt. It's a third-person, story-driven action game that depends upon a unique setting and an interesting graphical flair to grab the gamer and pull him or her into the experience. The thing is , El Shaddai is one of those attempts gone wrong, a game that simply doesn't come together despite everything it throws out there. It's more pretentious and muddled than fun and coherent, which effectively ruins its high potential.

At its core, El Shaddai is an action game akin to many hack-and-slash titles on the market today. But there are several twists that set it apart from its contemporaries. First and foremost is its plot. Ascension of the Metatron revolves around the Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish script. It's a high-concept story, but that's where things start to fall apart almost immediately for El Shaddai. It tells its story poorly, constantly interrupting gameplay with meaningless explanations and descriptions of nebulous events and characters. There's never any clarity in El Shaddai, and it's a huge problem.

Exit Theatre Mode

But El Shaddai's rambling story is only the tip of the iceberg. Gameplay is king, and El Shaddai's gameplay leaves much to be desired as well. On its exterior, El Shaddai takes the roll of a fairly deep third-person action game, requiring the use of combos and various weapons to work your way through its dozen chapters. But we're only talking about faux depth here. El Shaddai is a button-masher, and while you could certainly utilize some cursory combos and skills at your leisure, why would you if the game never really forces you to? You could just mash Square over and over again while occasionally blocking an enemy attack or parrying out of the way of danger. With the exception of a few boss fights that get slightly more complicated, such basic tactics will get the job done.

Another major issue with El Shaddai's gameplay is something that really should have been one of its coolest features: its emphasis on stealing enemy weapons and using them to exploit weaknesses. But the game has only three weapons to speak of -- a quick-swinging blade, a defense-heavy bludgeon, and a ranged missile attack -- and stealing and using them over and over again gets old. While it's fun to try to figure out the weaknesses of enemies during the first few chapters, it quickly becomes apparent what works on whom, and fighting becomes less and less fun, and more and more of a chore.

Boring, boring combat.

A final gameplay-related issue worth noting is El Shaddai's complete lack of a HUD. While it's a design choice that's far from being unique at this point in the industry's history, El Shaddai's no-HUD philosophy is truly problematic. There's a lot going on in the background of El Shaddai that you simply cannot see during your first playthrough, including a points meter, a power-up system that allows you to use special attacks, and even a gauge that governs your ability to revive yourself after dying. But the only suggestion you'll have from the game on your overall health is the status of your armor.

And remember when I said that you can't see a HUD on your first playthrough? That's because once you beat El Shaddai, you can play through it again with a HUD. That's right. You have to obnoxiously stumble your way through the game once and then work up the nerve to play it again if you want it the way El Shaddai should have been presented in the first place. I was -- and continue to be -- absolutely staggered by such a terrible design choice.

The good news for El Shaddai is that it's a beautiful game that is outright stunning at times. While it's not graphically superior per se, it still totes an impressive design unlike anything you've ever seen before, with constantly-changing themes and color pallets that keep things fresh. While the character design borders on laughable and the enemy designs are both repetitive and uninspired, the environments you'll be fighting through are anything but. The soundtrack is great as well, with some really epic tunes accompanying El Shaddai's maddeningly poor gameplay. Visually and sonically, El Shaddai shines, but the gameplay fails to live up to the high level of quality set by its aesthetics, and that's disappointing.

One of El Shaddai's 2D sequences.

When you put everything together -- the game's beautiful graphics and great music with its subpar gameplay and nonsensical story -- what you end up with is a game short on clarity and high on incoherence. El Shaddai is a muddled mess. Even though its gameplay and plot leave much to be desired, it's truly disappointing that both were so poorly executed with the other in mind. Gameplay is constantly interrupted for random story sections. The story sections don't make an incredible amount of sense. The game jumps between 3D and 2D fairly often and has its fair share of confounding scenes with boss battles you're supposed to lose and other weird sequences that seem completely out of place.

In the end, El Shaddai attempts to do too much, and much of what it does it doesn't do well.

The Verdict

I never developed a cadence while playing El Shaddai. The game has absolutely no rhythm. And most importantly, even after beating it, I never felt like I really got anywhere. I never felt like I excelled at the game even though I saw it through to the end. I never felt that I was getting better. I was simply going through the motions. And the motions were terribly boring and tested my patience more often than I&#Array;d like to admit.

A second playthrough with the HUD certainly provides for an improved experience. And the game&#Array;s aesthetics are its saving grace. But regardless, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron simply isn&#Array;t a good game. And that&#Array;s too bad, because it certainly had the makings of one.